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I salute my noble friend Lord Mitchell, who has taken over the leadership of the organisation which brings people together against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We must work in that area if we want to continue to live in a decent, comfortable and friendly
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We all know that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester said, dialogue between members of different faiths is absolutely key to building a stronger, more cohesive society; it is the first essential. We have seen the terrible consequences in this country, especially in London, of people of faith replacing discussion and dialogue with extremism, violence and murder. I am pleased that our Government, especially the Department for Communities and Local Government and Secretary of State Hazel Blears, are working hard to combat the growth of that problem.
Dialogue is the first step towards a decent, friendly, happy life together. The crucial step to better relations was outlined by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his recent book, The Home we Build Together: the need for people of faith to work together side by side as well as talking face to face. He is right: we must work together. We must turn strangers into friends, and work towards our common good. Both dialogue and joining together on shared projects and paths lead to better relations and a more positive future between faiths.
I am not going to hold up another good friend of mine, the remarkable noble Baroness, Lady Verma. I shall end by saying that there are only two ways in which we need to remember this. First, we must all work hard together to build interfaith dialogue, so that we can work together for our common good, decency and peace. Secondly, the alternative to coming together in this way is indeed being torn further apart.
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Baroness Verma: My Lords, I, too, join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, for his most eloquent speech. I am pleased to be following the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester and my dear friend, the noble Lord, Lord Janner. Our connection is of course Leicester, which is a wonderful place to start talking about interfaith dialogue. In Leicester, we are not frightened to challenge those willing to create differences among the many communities that live there side by side.
As a little girl, I grew up in Great Britain when there were very few people from my community here. On one side of my house I had an Irish Catholic family, and on the other side there was a very strongly Scottish family, so we grew up with this wonderful mix of children playing out in the streets at a time when children played out in the streets. We fought, ate and did everything together. It is amazing how our faith was never in question. I was never less confident about the faith I had been born into, the Sikh community. I went on to marry my dear husband from the Hindu community, and my wedding dress came from my uncle in the Muslim community. I therefore understand the great things that all the different faiths bring
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I find it incredibly depressing that those who purport to be our community leaders tend usually to be those who are the great dividers of our communities. When I was in Paris talking to a group of ladies from the Muslim faith, I asked, “Do you know what Islam is lacking today? It is lacking the presence of good women from Islam who can speak its message to the world”. People will then be able to see that there is a much more positive side to Islam that the rest of the world does not always see.
I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London that communities which do not want to become involved with the cultures that exist in Great Britain today have gone into a vacuum in which they have created cultures which try to provide the moral leadership, the family lives and the networks that most of us were used to but which are now lacking. There are no easy solutions, but dialogue starts when people are tiny tots. Children are great teachers in showing how you can get on. You can disagree—it is amazing how children disagree and fight, and the next day are back together again, but adults have forgotten that lesson.
I was really pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, say that within the Muslim community the moderate Muslim must get up and make his voice heard. As my noble friend Lord Sheikh said, the media have a huge responsibility. In recent years, they have worked on heightening the prejudices of people who do not understand a particular situation, faith or religion. Growing up in a country where so many freedoms are available, I believe that there is an onus on those of us who can to go out there and encourage people from the business and academic communities sometimes to challenge those community leaders who speak on our behalf.
My plea to the Government is this: when you give funds to organisations in local communities, look carefully at where the money is going. I can assure your Lordships that I have been on many tours and trips, and I have sat in the back of community halls and listened to the venom from these supposedly great community leaders installed in the audience. I challenged Mark Thompson from the BBC, when I said to him that the media have a responsibility to show the moderate voice of all religions, otherwise all you get are nutters and fruitcakes coming forward to speak. It is important to note that in having this debate, we unfortunately allow the BNP and other extreme organisations to flag up and inflame prejudices.
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Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hameed for initiating this important debate and so eloquently opening it today. As others have said, in our current climate it is so easy to see faith and religion as instruments of division rather than unity; as bringers of unrest rather than peace. So I want humbly to address what has been
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After 9/11, the First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, rapidly called together the leaders of all the great faith groups in Wales and started a programme of meeting twice a year. Thus, the faith groups and politicians come together regularly in a spirit of open dialogue as the Faith Communities Forum. This provides a platform to discuss issues concerning the faith communities, communities of those of no faith and the Government. Members include all the faith groups and the leaders of all the political parties. The faith leaders then decided to meet more often and out of that emerged the Inter-Faith Council for Wales, which now has a formal constitution and officers in Cardiff and Swansea. It links to Cytun, formerly the Council of Churches for Wales, whose objective is to bring together different denominations to,
Last June, the Muslim Council of Wales invited the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, to address an audience of about 500 people. It was the first time that the cardinal had addressed the Muslim community, and his address opened the door to honest and frank discussion between Muslims and Christians without worrying about political correctness. Following that, a second successful discussion was hosted to look at the fears that faith communities have about each other, and in June another meeting will look specifically at turning ignorance into knowledge and intolerance into understanding.
At a local level, the Muslim Council of Wales has supported and sponsored the 1st Cathays (Al-Huda) Scout Group in Cardiff, which was set up in 2006 and is now one of the biggest groups in the region. It recently hosted a dinner in honour of the visit of church leaders from Syria and Lebanon. The Archbishop of Wales and the Archbishop of Cardiff attended the dinner, and the guests from Syria and Lebanon were amazed at the understanding and relationships that had been built up between the two faiths.
The Muslim Council of Wales is bringing men, women and organisations from different faiths together to work alongside each other and demonstrate the positive work that interfaith groups can achieve through shared aims to tackle the great problems of today’s world at every level. At social functions that it has arranged, to which I have had the honour of being invited, there have been representatives of all the religious groups: Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and so on.
Much important interfaith work is in educating children and young people about faith issues and interfaith relations to minimise their susceptibility to extremism and ensure that they do not fall into the wrong hands. That is happening at every level in society. The Islamic Social Services Association Wales was recently launched to mirror regular social services but is tailored specifically to be sensitive to and cater for the needs Muslim families.
Healthcare sees interfaith in action. As noble Lords know, I have for many years worked with the dying and have seen how often those of no faith seek
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The relationships between interfaith leaders are precious and must be nurtured. They are developed at grass roots, in the classroom, at the school gate, in the workplace and by being together at social functions and sharing charity fundraising events, just to name a few.
I am not blinkered to the prejudices that exist in our society; even in Wales, I am not blinkered. This year on Holocaust Day, the monument to the victims of the Armenian genocide was shamefully desecrated. It had been funded and erected outside the Welsh National Temple of Peace and Health—the old League of Nations building in Cardiff—by the tiny Armenian community in Wales.
Faith and religion are often seen as instruments of division and unrest. Interfaith work at all levels of society—from the school yard to Scotland Yard, from the community centre to central government, from the school assembly to the Welsh Assembly, from the university common room to the House of Commons—is the key to the future of multifaith, multiethnic Britain. We must continue to keep open hearts and minds so that the name of religion cannot become an excuse for tribal approaches and warring factions in society.
3.44 pm
Lord Mitchell: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, is to be congratulated on introducing this debate. The noble Lord’s commitment to interfaith activity is total and his excellent and, dare I say, brave speech makes it abundantly clear that he is prepared to stand up and be counted.
I have recently become chair of the Coexistence Trust, and I feel privileged that the noble Lord, Lord Hameed, is one of our trustees. I have taken over from its founder, my noble friend Lord Janner of Braunstone. I am delighted to say that he is remaining as president of the trust, together with His Royal Highness Prince Hassan of Jordan. I am also thrilled that my noble friend will continue to travel the world enlisting the support of parliamentarians against the twin scourges of anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic activity. It certainly makes me sleep a little easier at night knowing that my noble friend is there to be consulted and to help. He knows full well that I will seek his advice and seek it often. His work on behalf of the Jewish people is legendary, and we all owe him a huge debt for his tireless work.
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When the results of today's local elections become known, we may well be horrified to learn that the BNP has made significant advances. For that to have happened should concern us all. It should act as a wake-up call to the many ethnic groups in this country, and we should be working together to counter that enemy. The BNP has become very sophisticated—no longer unkempt thugs, today its members dress in suits and ties, understanding full well that they need to change their image. They have also needed to change their message: instead of crude racist smears, today they harness all the powers of mass media communication. It is the BNP that has mastered the use of the internet in communicating its message. In that respect, it leaves all the other parties standing. But no matter how well dressed they are, how smooth their presentation may be, no matter what technological wizardry they employ, their underlying message is still the same. It is about hatred, it is about intolerance, it is about racism and it is about total rejection of our multicultural society. Whatever their guise, they are as abhorrent as they have ever been.
The BNP and its ilk are one threat. The other threat, of course, is terrorism. Islamic extremists have made no secret of how they regard the Jews. Noble Lords should read the propaganda that those fringe bodies put out—Dr Goebbels himself would approve of every word. The Jewish community in this country realised long ago that wringing our hands was not an option. We needed to take proactive action. The BNP and Islamic extremists may well hate each other, but they are united in their hatred of Jews.
Walk past any synagogue when there is a service in progress and you will see security guards in attendance. Go to any Jewish social event and the security will be intense. The Community Security Trust is the Jewish community's answer to the threats that we face, and I pay tribute to it. Like many noble Lords here today, I am committed to interfaith dialogue. It is good to talk, but talking is not enough. It may make us feel good, but how much does it change the facts on the ground?
When I look at BNP election material, I see articles directed at the Asian community and, in particular, the Muslim community, but we are not fooled. All that is required is for the words Asian and Muslim to be changed to the word Jewish. The message is clear: we are their enemy; we must fight them together.
Last summer, I read the chilling book, The Islamist, by Ed Husain. It tells of his journey as a second-generation Muslim; how he became radicalised and became a leading member of the extreme Islamist political action group Hizb ut-Tahrir; and, finally, how he became disenchanted. He says:
That is the truth. Wherever we come from—I am a third-generation immigrant—we, too, want our children to grow up in a secure and tolerant society.
I advocate action, so let me say what we at the Coexistence Trust would like to do. We want to be proactive. Our first action has been to form a group of Muslim and Jewish parliamentarians from both your
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Finally, without any sense of superiority whatever and simply because the Jewish community got there first, our immigrant story perhaps needs to be recounted so that the Muslim community can have some appreciation of where we got it right and where we got it wrong. A hundred and twenty-five years ago, my family and hundreds of thousands like them came to Britain. They were penniless, could not speak the language, ate strange foods and faced fierce prejudice. Despite this, they endured and prospered. When they came, they lived in the East End of London and the poorer districts of Manchester and Leeds. Where they trod yesterday, the Muslim community treads today. It is clear that we have much in common and that we should help each other.
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Lord Alton of Liverpool: My Lords, the varied, moving and often powerful contributions to today’s debate illustrate why my noble friend Lord Hameed has chosen so well this subject for debate in your Lordships’ House today. I think that we all thank him for that.
I have just three points to make. First, dialogue must be entrenched by deeds. Secondly, it must be respectful and learn from the experiences of other faith traditions. Thirdly, it must not be a polite fudge—a pretext for dodging the hard questions.
Earlier in our debate, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London cited the experience from Liverpool of Faiths4Change. Eighteen months ago, I, along with Mr Akbar Ali, the trustee of the Liverpool mosque, planted an olive tree on a vacant site in Toxteth in Liverpool that is owned by the Catholic Church. The site has been gifted to Habitat for Humanity, a Christian charity that has built 150,000 houses throughout the world. I recently attended the handover of the first houses on this site. The new householders contributed “sweat equity” by helping in the construction work. They pay for their home through no-profit, no-interest long-term loans. The Liverpool project has been spearheaded by Shannon Leadbetter, a dynamic young Anglican woman.
In his deeply thought-provoking and stimulating new book, The Home We Build Together, to which the noble Lord, Lord Janner, referred earlier, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi, writes about his visit to a Habitat for Humanity project in London, in which Jews and others from non-Christian faiths have been involved. He says:
Dialogue must be entrenched by deeds.
Dialogue also needs to be honest, respectful and willing to learn from the experiences of other faith traditions. The most obvious contemporary example, to which the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, and others
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As an English Catholic, however, it also strikes me that a proper understanding of the Catholic story, from the 16th century until emancipation in 1829, can also throw a lot of light on what happens when religious believers are ostracised, alienated or radicalised. There was, after all, even a time when a Bill was laid before Parliament to remove children over the age of seven from their family homes if their Catholic parents did not conform.
Scores of young men—brilliant academics such as Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and John Gerard—slipped out of the country and returned as Catholic priests, often hunted down, arrested, tortured and put to death. Campion was ultimately tried here in the Great Hall before being taken to the Tower of London and then to Tyburn, today’s Marble Arch, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered. Happily we live in better times, but the effect then was dramatic. For those whose families faced ruinous fines and the confiscation of property and land, it inspired courage and defiance. For the state, it created a new wave of brutality. Every organ of the state was used to wage systematic persecution. It also led to a disastrous blurring of an explicitly religious mission with subversive political and violent conspiracies. The more the so-called bloody question was put to Catholics, the more impossible their situation became. If they fully understood their own history, English Catholics would be in a particularly good position therefore to reach out to young Muslims living in Britain today.
Dialogue needs to be entrenched by deeds, and understanding and sensitive of other people’s histories and their stories. It also needs to be truthful and honest, and not to dodge tough questions. Reference has been made already to the situation elsewhere and millions of Christians have been persecuted for their faith in many parts of the world. The Jubilee Campaign which I helped to found some years ago has often highlighted many of those cases. We need to enter into the pain and suffering of each other’s traditions. People from all faiths suffer for their faith in different parts of the world.
As my noble friend Lord Hameed has said, we all need to face some hard truths and to disentangle legitimate questions about the use of violence, and the place of tolerance and respect. Dialogue needs to establish how we can learn to live together despite our differences. Mistrust and bitter divisions will not be replaced overnight and, at times, we will need patience, which, surely, was the lesson that many of us learnt during the years of Archbishop Derek Warlock and Bishop David Sheppard—Lord Sheppard as he became—during the period of the so-called Mersey miracle in Liverpool.
My noble friend Lord Hameed has already done much valuable work in facilitating trust and mutual respect, and I join others in hoping that this debate will deepen and strengthen those initiatives.
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